Abandoned in Hell : The Fight for Vietnam's Firebase Kate (9780698144262) Read Online Free

me, most had enlisted or been drafted straight out of high school. A few had several months of combat under their belts, but even they could not have been prepared for what awaited us in late October 1969.
    And so we went more or less happily onto the isolated hilltop called Kate, ignorant of the misaligned forces that controlled our fate, never expecting a bloody five-day monsoon of steel and fire, and entirely unaware that the ARVN generals responsible for our lives loathed and feared the mountain tribesmen on whom we relied to defend us and our isolated hilltop from the fierce and relentless PAVN infantry.
    This is how it went, to the best of our recollections.

PART
    ONE

 
    Cannon to right of them,
    Cannon to left of them,
    Cannon in front of them
    Volley’d and thunder’d;
    Storm’d at with shot and shell,
    Boldly they rode and well,
    Into the jaws of Death,
    Into the mouth of Hell
    Rode the 600.
    â€”Alfred, Lord Tennyson

ONE
    Bu Prang, Republic of Vietnam, October 1969
    I did not want to go to Fire Support Base Kate. It was about six kilometers southeast of Bu Prang Special Forces Camp, close to the Cambodia border. There was nothing going on there, not a damn thing, and I’d barely gotten my feet on the ground in my first combat assignment as executive officer (XO) of Special Forces Team A-236.
    A few days earlier, intelligence officers had warned that Special Forces camps along the border at Bu Prang and Duc Lap could expect an attack soon. I told Lieutenant Colonel Frank Simmons, commander of B-23, my boss’s boss, that my talents would be wasted on Kate. I had much to do to prepare Camp Bu Prang for the expected attack. I didn’t want to go out to Kate and sit on my ass.
    Simmons said that he understood my feelings. And that I was going to Kate.
    Maybe it was because an “A” Team authorized only one captain and one first lieutenant—but at the moment, ours had one lieutenant and three captains, and I was the greenest of the trio. I presented myself at six feet and200 whipcord-lean pounds of rough, tough, romping, stomping, face-chewing, bullet-spewing, airborne Green Beret hell—but I’d just turned 21. And I had just pinned on captain’s bars. I’d never commanded troops in the field, never heard a shot fired in anger. Surely I was the youngest Special Forces captain in South Vietnam—very likely the youngest captain of any description among the half million American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen stationed there.
    So maybe, in Simmons’s mind, sending me to sit on my ass on a remote hill for a few weeks was just the thing to start breaking me in. Or something.
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    A typical Vietnam-era Green Beret “A” Team of two officers and ten noncoms, A-236 was based in the tiny market town of Bu Prang, close to a contested salient along the porous, ill-defined Cambodian border, and about forty air miles southwest of Buon Ma Thuot, capital city of Dak Lak Province and the strategic linchpin of South Vietnam’s enormous but thinly populated Central Highlands region. To save ourselves the anguish of learning Vietnamese and its tones—to most American ears, they are all but indistinguishable from one another—we called Buon Ma Thuot by its initials, BMT.
    The highlands are a series of vast, contiguous plateaus bordering the lower part of Laos and northeastern Cambodia. For more than a thousand years, these jungle-covered hills have supported at least thirty distinct tribal societies spread among six different ethnic groups speaking dialects and languages drawn primarily from the Malayo-Polynesian, Tai, and Mon-Khmer language families. Collectively, these minority societies call themselves the Degar.
    Until the eighth century, the Degar tribes thrived in the lowlands and valleys along Vietnam’s warm, fertile coast. Over the next thousand years, however, they were steadily pushed into the